Training for impact: building an understanding of community development training and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community development outcomes

This report is the second evaluation of Wontulp Bi-Buya College (WBBC) commissioned by TEAR Australia to investigate the effectiveness of the Certificate III in Addiction Management and Community Development (AMCD III) training offered to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. The report covers the period 2012–August 2014

Training for Life: supporting communities to reduce the risk of suicide. The delivery of Certificate IV in Indigenous Mental Health (Suicide Prevention). Wontulp Bi-Buya College, 2014–2015.

[Extract] This report is a review of the delivery of the Indigenous Mental Health (Suicide Prevention) Certificate IV, (hereby known as IMH) has been conducted by Dr Anne Stephens, education sociologist and evaluation expert, the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Cairns. As part of the Community prevention for high risk groups initiative of the Taking Action to Tackle Suicide (TATS) Package, Wontulp -Bi -Buya College (WBBC) has delivered the IMH in two intakes: • May 2014 - Nov 2014 • Feb 2015 – Nov 2015 The course was developed by WBBC's College Course Advisory Committee with WBBC Trainer and Course Coordinator, Rev. Leslie Baird. Rev. Baird developed the Strategic Plan for Suicide Prevention in Yarrabah (1995/6). Rev. Baird adapted the Indigenous Mental Health for suicide prevention and cultural suitability, to comply with the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA), in consultation with Indigenous leaders. As a pilot the IMH course has been highly effective in promoting localised responses to suicide and mental health issues within Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The course is transferrable to other delivery settings outside of Cairns. There have been 60 enrolees. 78% of the total enrolees completed the course. On average, students are over 45 years of age. 85% of enrolees were female in the 2014 intake and 77% in the 2015 intake. Student’s average age were 47.4 (female) and 41.8 (male). The average highest level of formal education is year 10. Two students had a degree qualification but most had medium to high literacy needs. WBBC core mission is to produce empowered community leaders. With the increased awareness of mental health and suicide WBBC students are participants of a staged encounter in which students feel a new or renewed sense of belonging to a network, movement or cause. Graduates have developed personal empowerment and sense of control over their own life circumstance and environment. As each student participant will be active in teaching and mentoring others this is crucial to their own mental health and capability to promote help seeking behaviour and promotion of positive lifestyle choices in others. They emerge with a set of oral and practical skills to work effectively with service providers in existing health and community services or in finding a niche to fill. Six graduates of the 2014 course are now engaged in full-time work having completed the IMH course

Prioritizing gender, marginalized voices and ecologies

This year marks the start of the SDG era: a global commitment to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 that are universal, integrated and indivisible and highlight the link between sustainable development and the social, economic and environmental fields. A systemic evaluation guide that integrates gender equality, environments and voices from the margins (the GEMs) is being developed and piloted by the UN Women Independent Evaluation Office, in collaboration with Australian and American researchers and an international advisory group. It builds on existing evaluation practices using a methodology informed by feminist systems thinking, critical systems thinking and intersectionality theory, and involves stakeholders in an effort to locally define, analyze and implement evaluations as a means to contribute to social change and national capacity development within the SDG context. This presentation will provide an overview of the ‘GEMs Approach’ methodological and theoretical background and of the pilots in which it is currently being tested

Globalisation and education: a study of two New Basics Schools: critical systemic intervention and the New Basics Project

[Extract] Schools are complex places. They are grand social institutions, situated in local places, the site of complex cultural struggles. In the schoolyard and in the classroom, individuals seek to find their identity mediating the images, messages and knowledges about their world. Simultaneously, issues of 'complex connectivity' (Tomlinson, 1999), the rapidly moving networks of 'interdependencies that characterise modern social life' (p. 4), place economic, political and environmental pressures from local, state, national and global realms, on schools. Pressures that are valued are welcomed and desirable, and enter through the front door. Devalued cultural entities, commonly misunderstood and considered devious by teachers and parents, arrive by jumping the fences, hitchhiking in backpacks, or as illegal downloads, and remain marginalised by the dominant authority but are often fiercely guarded within youth cultures being played out in the school yard and classrooms

Why exposure to prosody should precede the teaching of reading

Japanese students of EFL typically demonstrate superior reading comprehension to oral skills. This is a reflection of an examination system weighted in favour of reading comprehension skills (see Garant, 2000). However attaining reading comprehension skills without an oral foundation is burdensome (Watanabe, 2002) and typically requires considerable memorization. Studies of first language acquisition indicate the formative role of prosody in developing reading comprehension. (Fox, 2010; Whalley & Hansen, 2006). Japanese EFL learners would benefit from increased exposure to prosody in order to develop reading comprehension more efficiently.外国語として英語を学習する日本人学生は、通常、会話力よりも読解力が優れている。読解力に重きを置いた入試の在り方が反映されているからである。しかし、会話の基礎力がない状態で、読解力を伸ばすのは、学生の負担になり、通常、相当な丸暗記が必要になる。第1言語と第2言語の習得に関する研究では、読解力を伸ばす上での音素認識と韻律の役割が指摘されている。つまり、このふたつが読解学習の前提条件とみなされているのである。第1言語学習者が頻繁に音読を聞かされるのと同じく、日本の子どもたちに、読解力をより効率的に向上させるのに役立つよう、音読を頻繁に聞かせるべきである

The Cooktown Ten: a problem structuring model for violence prevention: addressing violence through primary care

This piece of writing is to provide background and description of our thinking behind The Cooktown-Ten (C-10). The C-10 is a model for use in primary care to encourage the prevention of violence. Understood as a pathogenesis, it can be used by health professionals in primary care settings. The violence that has the potential to be prevented in primary care settings is violence that occurs on a personal scale. This includes a range of significant harms to individuals and groups including self-harm, workplace, domestic, intimate partner, family and community violence, and suicide. The subject of significant attention in Australia, the elimination of violence against women and their children, such as gender-based sexual assault, harassment and domestic violence, is a national priority. In our opinion a significant gap in the suite of prevention efforts is the capacity to work with all people at risk of using violence prior to any event. Yet most practitioners work with those affected after the act. The pathogenesis of violence presented in this paper is based on many years of clinical practice and brings together literature from divergent fields. The C-10 is a problem structuring tool for counselling opportunities to understand, explain and ameliorate all types of violence including physical, psychological, social, and self-directed harms, and to identify and make an effective plan to support people to make positive choices for non-violent action. It has been developed and used in time and resource poor settings with and for General Practitioners (GPs), nurses, allied and other health sector workers. Any such model should be useful to practitioners and be just complex and robust enough to enable an exploration of the variety of nuances within a persons' situation. Our model can be used to explain repetitive cycles and effects of interpersonal violence and self-directed harm. The C-10 can be used with individuals, groups, families and communities. It is intended as a free resource for clinical use. Currently clinical applications are based on Level 5 evidence. It is hoped that ongoing research will build on this evidence base. At a minimum, this model provides a conversation template and a take-home framework to allow individuals to reflect, anticipate and modify their responses to problems—to make deliberate choices to avoid violence in their actions

The changing balances of equity, control and market choice in the Indigenous vocational education and training sector

The rationales and related programs for delivering vocational education and training to Indigenous Australians have seen significant change over the past 40 years, with several influential reviews marking policy pivot points along the way. Commencing with the 1960s Martin Review, the implementation by governments of selected recommendations have led to structural reforms and the creation of public policy instruments to monitor, regulate and control access to vocational training. These activities have heavily impacted Australian First Nations people for whom certificate level qualifications are disproportionally the highest level of post-school education held. In the ‘thin’ markets of regional Australia, in particular, the authors of this paper argue that the changing priorities in training policy have systematically perpetuated inequity of access to, and benefit from vocational education and training, contrary to the original conception of a national post-secondary technical and further education system for Australia. Marketisation of the training sector and the transfer of funding responsibility from the public purse to the individual student/worker have produced low rates of employment and high training attrition rates for First Nations people. We argue that this arises from a fundamental shift in the meaning of equity itself. Culminating in today’s implementation of training under the Indigenous Advancement Strategy explores how the refusal of self-determination, unscrupulous practices, limited choice and culturally inappropriate training continues to reinforce the nation’s persistent failure to close the gap in Indigenous wellbeing

Inclusive systemic thinking supporting the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda

Exploring the place-based, local responses to the UN sustainable development goals and monitoring and evaluation mechanisms that contribute to the building of global governance systems in the Agenda 2030 era

The global political participation and leadership of women: use of the ISE₄GEMs approach to undertake a UN Women corporate evaluation

In 2016 a collaboration of researchers from Australia and the UK collaborated with UN Women’s Independent Evaluation Office to develop the Inclusive Systemic Evaluation (ISE) Approach for Gender Equality, Environments, and voices from the Margins (GEMs): A Guide for Evaluators for the SDG Era (hereon known as the ISE Guidance). Intended to be a practical tool to support the future provisions of people with serious unmet needs, whether physical, social, economic, educational, or political. It contains a dozen tools, examples of practice and other resources to evaluate multiple and concurrent systems of complex situations. It was also developed in response to meeting the demand for robust and appropriate systemic methodology, tools, strategies, and training for practitioners working with the Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goals in the international development sector. The Guidance was published mid 2017 but testing and refining the draft methodology commenced in late 2016 with the UN Women corporate evaluation of the global participation of women in leadership and politics. In this presentation Anne Stephens will introduce both the ISE Guidance and UN Evaluation Expert Shravanti Reddy (via skype) to discuss the benefits and learnings of using this approach to high-level corporate evaluation. They will also discuss how the ISE contributes to building knowledge and practice of evaluation across a range of complex situations and the capacity development required to implement the ISE Guide in your setting

How Are We Doing: project evaluation of community organisation and development certificate III delivered by Wontulp Bi-Buya College, 2008–2010

The Wontulp Bi-Buya (WBB) College teaches a range of courses for Indigenous Australians with a view to empowering, promoting and achieving personal, professional and spiritual development of individuals. The College is funded by TEAR Australia to deliver the Certificate III Community Organising and Development (COD) for community leaders. The two-year course has been operating since 2006 and graduated over 50 students. A team from James Cook University evaluated the COD course to learn more about the impact the course is having in Indigenous Communities. The evaluators found that there is a strong correlation between Indigenous training in community development, and Indigenous empowerment, both at the personal and community level